SOURCE: "The Three Faces of June: Anaïs Nin's Appropriation of Feminine Writing," in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 14, Fall 1995, pp. 309-24.

In the following essay, Felber examines Nin's assertion that she wrote "as a woman only," particularly in her fictionalized portraits of June.

As early as the 1930s, Anaïs Nin described her objective as that of writing "as a woman, and as a woman only" in the prose poem House of Incest,¹ purportedly composed after Henry Miller stole ideas from her unpublished diary for his own work. The subsequent claims by Nin and her circle throughout her career that she was writing a new feminine prose might be dismissed as merely a marketing technique. Miller's pronouncement that her diary provides "the first female writing I have ever seen," revealing "the opium world of woman's physiological being, a sort of cinematic show put on inside the...